At the moment the British Labour party is in the news with claims of anti-Semitism in its ranks. On the one hand, I don’t doubt that the modern Labour party has certain people in it like Livingstone or former members like the odious George Galloway who have a disgraceful and disgusting relationship with Islamists, and who have a one-sided and unfair bias against Israel in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

But, despite all the hysteria, this is such an overblown issue. If one really wants to significantly reduce anti-Semitism in Europe, isn’t the solution obvious? Isn’t it to stop mass immigration of people amongst whom there are disproportionate numbers who hold viciously anti-Semitic views?

It’s a shame when the only people (apparently) willing to speak about this are the neoconservative right, since it is an issue that ought to concern any rational left-wing, secular people.

I don’t like Douglas Murray (especially given his pro-austerity nonsense), but here he has a point.

The really major problem with anti-Semitism in Europe, I am afraid, comes not from the British Labour party, but from within the community that Douglas Murray is speaking about here, which also has a serious problem with misogyny, homophobia, and religious extremism.

Having said that, I suppose I will now infuriate people on the other side, for it also seems to me that Ken Livingstone is being treated unfairly.

“The Haavara Agreement (Hebrew: הסכם העברה Translit.: heskem haavara Translated: ‘transfer agreement’) was an agreement between Nazi Germany and Zionist German Jews signed on 25 August 1933. The agreement was finalized after three months of talks by the Zionist Federation of Germany, the Anglo-Palestine Bank (under the directive of the Jewish Agency) and the economic authorities of Nazi Germany. The agreement was designed to help facilitate the emigration of German Jews to Palestine. While it helped Jews emigrate, it forced them to temporarily give up possessions to Germany before departing. Those possessions could later be re-obtained by transferring them to Palestine as German export goods. The agreement was controversial at the time, and was criticised by many Jewish leaders both within the Zionist movement (such as the Revisionist Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky) and outside it.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haavara_Agreement

The Transfer Agreement incentivised German Jewish emigration to Palestine by allowing those emigrating to transfer £1,000 (or about 15,000 Reichsmark), but in terms of export goods from Germany, while at the same time they only paid a smaller “flight tax” than other emigrants (essentially this means that the Nazis robbed the emigrants to Palestine of their property to a lesser degree than other emigrants bound for different countries).

Of course, none of this means that the Zionist organisations approved of Nazi Germany, nor that the Nazis or Hitler personally approved of Zionism. Nor that the Nazis were not guilty of vehement and pathological anti-Semitism. If anything, the Zionist organisations by the Transfer Agreement helped to save some 60,000 German Jews who emigrated, so in that respect they acted to save lives.

Nevertheless, amongst the Nazis, there was a bizarre and schizophrenic attitude to Zionism, and it was seen, at the very least, as useful in aiding the Nazi policy of expulsion of the Jews. If Livingstone had only said this and qualified his statements properly, none of this would have been false.

A good book on this is Francis R. Nicosia’s The Third Reich and the Palestine Question (I. B. Tauris, London, 1986). Nicosia, in addition to using evidence available on the public record, actually used Nazi party archives and German Foreign Ministry archives, and he shows that in the 1930s the Nazis – although nobody denies their vicious and murderous anti-Semitism – regarded the Zionist movement as a politically useful tool because it helped to encourage the 1930s Nazi policy of forced emigration of Jews from Germany and even provided a suitable destination, namely, the historic home in Palestine.

But, to return to the original issue, if Europe wants to reduce and fight the disease of anti-Semitism, then why import more and more anti-Semites? It’s a simple question.

Friday, April 29, 2016

“In the immediate post-war years France was in poor shape; wages remained at around half prewar levels, the winter of 1946–1947 did extensive damage to crops, leading to a reduction in the bread ration, hunger and disease remained rife and the black market continued to flourish. Germany was in an even worse position, but after 1948 things began to improve dramatically with the introduction of Marshall Aid—large scale American financial assistance given to help rebuild European economies and infrastructure. This laid the foundations of a meticulously planned program of investments in energy, transport and heavy industry, overseen by the government of Prime Minister Georges Pompidou.

In the context of a population boom unseen in France since the 18th century, the government intervened heavily in the economy, using dirigisme—a unique combination of free-market and state-directed economy—with indicative five-year plans as its main tool. This brought about a rapid transformation and expansion of the French economy.

High-profile projects, mostly but not always financially successful, were launched: the extension of Marseille's harbour (soon ranking third in Europe and first in the Mediterranean); the promotion of the Caravelle passenger jetliner (a predecessor of Airbus); the decision to start building the supersonic Franco-British Concorde airliner in Toulouse; the expansion of the French auto industry with state-owned Renault at its centre; and the building of the first motorways between Paris and the provinces.

Aided by these projects, the French economy recorded growth rates unrivalled since the 19th century. In 1964, for the first time in nearly 100 years France’s GDP overtook that of the United Kingdom. This period is still remembered in France with some nostalgia as the peak of the Trente Glorieuses (‘Thirty Glorious Years’ of economic growth between 1945 and 1974).

In 1967, de Gaulle decreed a law that obliged all firms over certain sizes to distribute a small portion of their profits to their employees. By 1974, as a result of this measure, French employees received an average of 700 francs per head, equivalent to 3.2% of their salary.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_de_Gaulle#.22Thirty_glorious_years.22

One of the most important French political leaders who oversaw that was Charles de Gaulle, President of the French Republic from 8 January 1959 to 28 April 1969, who despite being conservative was clearly no free market fanatic, and this can be seen in de Gaulle’s memoirs, where he quite unashamedly and proudly defended that French dirigisme of the post-WWII years:

“For us, then, the task of the state was not to force the nation under a yoke, but to guide its progress. However, though freedom remained an essential lever in economic action, this action was nonetheless collective, since it directly controlled the nation’s destiny, and it continually involved social relations. It thus required an impetus, a harmonizing influence, a set of rules, which could only emanate from the state. In short, what was needed was State direction (dirigisme). I myself was resolved on it; and this was one of the reasons why I had wanted the Republic's institutions to be such that the government’s means matched its responsibilities.

In practical terms, what it primarily amounted to was drawing up a national plan, in other words deciding on the goals, the priorities, the rates of growth and the conditions that had to be observed by the national economy, and determining the fields of development in which the state must intervene, along with laws and budgets. It is within this framework that the state increases or reduces taxation, eases or restricts credit, regulates customs duties; that it develops the national infrastructure – roads, railways, waterways, harbors, airports, communications, new cities, housing, etc.; harnesses the sources of energy – electricity, gas, coal, oil, atomic power; initiates research in the public sector and fosters it in the private; that it encourages the rational distribution of economic activity over the whole country; and by means of social security, education, and vocational training, facilitates the changes of employment forced upon many Frenchmen by modernization. In order that our country’s structures should be remolded and its appearance rejuvenated, my government, fortified by the newfound stability of the state, was to engage in manifold and vigorous interventions.” (Gaulle 1971: 150–151).

They don’t (as far as I know) make sensible and pragmatic politicians like that in France any more – or, for that matter, in other Western countries in our foolish neoliberal era.

But times can change radically, just as they did between the early 1930s and the 1940s, and hopefully they can change again.

Wednesday, April 27, 2016

Keynes visited the Soviet Union in the summer of 1925. He evidently tried hard to take a fair-minded view of Soviet Communism to please other people on the left, but just couldn’t do it.

From his essay “A Short View of Russia” (1925):

“Like other new religions, Leninism derives its power not from the multitude but from a small minority of enthusiastic converts whose zeal and intolerance make each one the equal in strength of a hundred indifferentists. .... Like other new religions, it persecutes without justice or pity those who actively resist it. Like other new religions, it is unscrupulous. Like other new religions, it is filled with missionary ardour and ecumenical ambitions. ....

I sympathise with those who seek for something good in Soviet Russia.

But when we come to the actual thing what is one to say? For me, brought up in a free air undarkened by the horrors of religion, with nothing to be afraid of, Red Russia holds too much which is detestable. Comfort and habits let us be ready to forgo, but I am not ready for a creed which does not care how much it destroys the liberty and security of daily life, which uses deliberately the weapons of persecution, destruction, and international strife. How can I admire a policy which finds a characteristic expression in spending millions to suborn spies in every family and group at home, and to stir up trouble abroad? Perhaps this is no worse and has more purpose than the greedy, warlike, and imperialist propensities of other Governments; but it must be far better than these to shift me out of my rut. How can I accept a [sc. communist] doctrine which sets up as its bible, above and beyond criticism, an obsolete economic textbook which I know to be not only scientifically erroneous but without interest or application for the modern world? How can I adopt a creed which, preferring the mud to the fish, exalts the boorish proletariat above the bourgeois and the intelligentsia who, with whatever faults, are the quality in life and surely carry the seeds of all human advancement? Even if we need a religion, how can we find it in the turbid rubbish of the Red bookshops? It is hard for an educated, decent, intelligent son of Western Europe to find his ideals here, unless he has first suffered some strange and horrid process of conversion which has changed all his values.”
http://www.gutenberg.ca/ebooks/keynes-essaysinpersuasion/keynes-essaysinpersuasion-00-h.html

Keynes’ judgement on Marx’s economics is especially interesting:

“How can I accept a [sc. communist] doctrine which sets up as its bible, above and beyond criticism, an obsolete economic textbook which I know to be not only scientifically erroneous but without interest or application for the modern world?”

And we can easily list these erroneous and obsolete doctrines as they exist in volume 1 of Capital:

(1) the size of the working class eventually stabilised and society was swelled by a growing and prosperous middle class and social mobility, contrary to Marx’s prediction of all people – except a small class of capitalists – being reduced to proletarians. Unemployment rates in capitalism are simply a cyclical result of the business cycle: even in the 19th century, unemployment rates did not grow and grow in the long run, as Marx’s theory predicts, but normally simply moved around a point somewhat above full employment, as John Maynard Keynes pointed out:

“our actual experience … [sc. is] that we oscillate, avoiding the gravest extremes of fluctuation in employment and in prices in both directions, round an intermediate position appreciably below full employment and appreciably above the minimum employment a decline below which would endanger life.”
Keynes, J. M. 1936. General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money , Chapter 18.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/keynes/general-theory/ch18.htm

(3) Marx thought that the large industrial reserve army is a necessary consequence and necessary condition of capitalism, but this is incorrect. In the Keynesian era of full employment, where there was very low unemployment and indeed labour scarcity in the advanced capitalist world, capitalism continued and thrived – indeed we now call it the “Golden Age” of capitalism.

(4) the long-run tendency of capitalism, even in the 19th century, was to massively increase the real wage, which has soared above subsistence level, even for workers (see here and here), contrary to Marx’s theory that the tendency of capitalism is to keep the real wage at a subsistence level (which is the value of the maintenance and reproduction of labour-power).

(5) the growing real wage and rising disposable income even of workers in capitalism also allowed a massive capacity for production of new commodities and new opportunities for employment (e.g., especially in services and middle class employment), which in turn has helped to overcome technological unemployment for most of the history of capitalism, contrary to Marx’s prediction of subsistence wages and increasing technological unemployment. Even if we do experience mass technological unemployment this century, it need not lead to disaster, with demand-management, a guaranteed income and government employment programs.

(6) Marx’s claim that machines, generally speaking, are an unmitigated evil in capitalism whose primary effect to increase the intensity and speed of work by labourers is an outrageous falsehood – a perversion of history and reality. In reality, machines have, generally speaking, tended to decrease the intensity, difficulty and monotony of human labour and often reduced to human labour to lighter work of visual inspection and overseeing of machine work, not physical labour. On this, see here and here. Advanced capitalist nations have also virtually eliminated child labour as well, and in our time have tended to pay women the same hourly wage for the same type of work as men.

(7) highly developed and advanced Western capitalist states like Britain and the US proved the most resistant to communism and Marxism (contrary to Marx’s theory), and when communist revolutions broke out it was in backward Russia and China.

2 October 1809 – the British defeat the French fleet in Zakynthos and capture Kefallonia, Kythera and Zakynthos

5 February 1811 – the Prince of Wales George becomes the Prince Regent

25 March 1811 – Percy Bysshe Shelley expuled from Oxford

6 April 1814 – Napoleon abdicated his throne

28 July 1814–13 September 1814 – Percy Bysshe Shelley elopes with Mary Godwin to the Continent, with Claire Clairmont; they travel to France and Switzerland

November 1814–9 June 1815 – the Congress of Vienna held in Vienna under Klemens Wenzel von Metternich

2 January 1815 – Lord Byron marries Annabella Millbanke; their daughter, Ada, was born in December of that year

20 March 1815–8 July 1815 – Hundred Days

9 June 1815 – signing of treaties of the Congress of Vienna

18 June 1815 – Battle of Waterloo

15 July 1815 – Napoleon demands asylum from British Captain Frederick Maitland on the HMS Bellerophon

16 October 1815 – Napoleon lands at St. Helena

20 November 1815–21 May 1864 – the British control the Ionian Islands, including Kerkyra (Corfu), Ithaki (Ithaca), Lefkada (Lefkas), Kefalonia (Cephalonia), Zakynthos (Zante), Paxi (Paxos), Kythira (Cythera). Corfu becomes the seat of the British Lord High Commissioner of the Ionian Islands. Chronology:

January 1817 – Britain grants the Ionian Islands a new constitution
November 1858–March 1859 – William Ewart Gladstone is Lord High Commissioner of the Ionian Islands
29 March 1864 – representatives of the United Kingdom, Greece, France, and Russia sign the Treaty of London, which pledges the transfer of the Ionian Islands to Greece upon ratification
2 May 1864 – the British leave the Ionian Islands
21 May 1864 – the Ionian Islands officially reunite with Greece.

25 April 1816 – Lord Byron left England forever

25 May 1816 – Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary met Lord Byron in Geneva

25 May 1816–28 August 1816 – famous summer at the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva, Switzerland, where Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley and Lord Byron meet; on the night of the 14–15 June, the group recounts ghost stories and this is the origin of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein

May 1832 – the British Foreign Secretary Palmerston convenes the London Conference of 1832 that decides that Greece should be a monarchy

27 May 1832 – beginning of the reign of Otto of Greece:

Kings of Greece
27 May 1832 – 23 October 1862 – Otto of Greece (deposed)
1834 – Athens becomes the capital of independent Greece
30 March 1863 – 18 March 1913 – George I of Greece

30 August 1832 – the borders of Greece confirmed in the London Protocol signed by the Great Powers

1835–1836 – Marx attended the University of Bonn to study law

1836 – before leaving for Berlin Marx became engaged to Jenny von Westphalen

1836–1840 – Marx attended the University of Berlin and joined the Young Hegelians

1837
1837 – Marx was a follower of Hegel and neglected his studies, all to his father’s intense disapproval

6 March 1837 – Charles Darwin moves from Cambridge to 36 Great Marlborough Street, London (in London from March 1837– September 1842)

20 June 1837 – accession of Queen Victoria (reigned from 1837–1901)

1838 – Marx visited his family in Trier to find his father on his death bed

c. 28 September 1838 – Charles Darwin reads Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population

1839
29 January 1839 – Charles Darwin and Emma Wedgwood married at Maer; they move to 12 Upper Gower Street in London

March 1839–October 1842 – the First Anglo-Afghan War between British India and the Emirate of Afghanistan:

December 1838 – the Army of the Indus under John Keane (1st Baron Keane) set out from Punjab
25 April–27 June 1839 – the army set up camp at Kandahar
22 July 1839 – British forces capture the fortress of Ghazni
August 1839 – Shuja Shah Durrani enthroned in Kabul
April–October 1841 – Afghan tribes north of the Hindu Kush mountains rebel
1 January 1842 – British garrison withdraws from Kabul; army attacked as it withdraws through snowbound passes
spring 1842 – Akbar Khan defeated near Jalalabad
August 1842 – General Nott advances from Kandahar and seizes Ghazni
September 1842 – British forces defeat all opposition and occupy Kabul
c. October 1842 – British forces withdraw from Afghanistan.

late 1839 – Marx embarked on his Doctoral dissertation called The Difference between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature

1845–1847 – Marx and Engels wrote The German Ideology, but this was never published in Marx’s lifetime

1846
1846 – Marx and Engels formed the Communist Correspondence Committee of Brussels

1847
1847 – Marx publishes The Poverty of Philosophy, an attack on Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s The System of Economic Contradictions, or The Philosophy of Poverty. Marx also set out his materialist view of history in this work, in which he had moved on from both Hegel and Ludwig von Feuerbach.

May 1847 – the British Government agreed to take over the debts of the New Zealand Company and to buy out their interests in the Colony

June 1847 – the London-based “League of the Just” held a meeting in London in which it decided to merge with Marx and Engels’ Communist Corresponding Committee. The new organisation was called the “Communist League” (1847–1852).

December 1847 to January 1848 – Marx and Engels write The Communist Manifesto

1848
21 February 1848 – The Communist Manifesto first published

March 1848 – Belgium expels Marx after putting him in jail for a night

23 March 1848–24 March 1849 – First Italian War of Independence fought between the Kingdom of Sardinia and the Austrian Empire

1848 – Marx in France

15 March 1848–4 October 1849 – Hungarian Revolution of 1848

23 March 1848 – the first settler ship the John Wickliffe arrives in Port Chalmers

27 March 1848 – foundation of the Canterbury Association (1848–1853), which is incorporated by Royal Charter on 13 November 1849; this was led by Edward Gibbon Wakefield and John Robert Godley. Wakefield was involved in the New Zealand Company, which by that time had already established four other colonies in New Zealand

April 1848 – Marx moved to Cologne

15 April 1848 – the second settler ship the Philip Laing arrives in Port Chalmers, New Zealand

1848–1849 – Marx in Cologne

September 1848 – there was an insurrection in Cologne but this was suppressed by the Prussians and the Neue Rheinische Zeitung was shut down in October

September 1848 – Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood founded at the home of John Millais’s parents on Gower Street, London by John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and William Holman Hunt

2 December 1848–21 November 1916 – reign of Franz Joseph, Emperor of Austria

1849
February 1849 – Marx was indicted for incitement to rebellion in Cologne, but in a trial was acquitted

March 1849 – Richard Francis Burton sails from Bombay

19 May 1849 – Marx left Cologne

27 or 28 August 1849 – Marx arrived in London

12 November 1849 – Engels arrived in London

1849–1883 – Marx lives in London

1850
1850 – Marx had an affair with Helene “Lenchen” Demuth (1820–1890) and an illegitimate son Frederick Demuth was born in 1851.

8 May–2 December 1850 – Marx lived at 64 Dean Street, Soho

June 1850 – Marx acquired an admission card to the library of the British Museum

1850–1856 – Marx lived at 28 Dean Street, Soho

c. November 1850 – Engels moves to Manchester to serve as a clerk in his father’s business Ermen and Engels

16 December 1850 – first ships of settlers arrived in Canterbury, New Zealand

1850s

1851
April 1851 – Marx visits Engels in Manchester

1 May–11 October 1851 – Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations or The Great Exhibition, in the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, London

23 June 1851 – Marx’s illegitimate child Henry Frederick was born

October 1851–July 1853 – William Stanley Jevons at University College, London; he leaves without degree

30 June 1852 – New Zealand Constitution Act 1852, which grants self-government to the Colony of New Zealand

October–November 1852 – the Cologne communist trial saw a number of the members of the Communist league connected with Marx and Willich jailed as seditious revolutionaries, and Marx agreed to the dissolution of the league

20 December 1852 – Lower Burma was formally annexed by the British empire

2 May 1857 – the Reading Room extension of the British Library officially opened; from 8–16 May, the library was opened for a special public viewing

1858
31 January 1858 – launch of the SS Great Eastern at the Isle of Dogs, designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel

1 May–c. late May 1858 – Marx visits Engels in Manchester

1 July 1858 – papers by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace on natural selection are read to the Linnean Society of London

2 August 1858 – Government of India Act 1858, the company was formally dissolved and its ruling powers over India were transferred to the British Crown

27 October 1858 – Theodore Roosevelt born at East 20th Street in New York City, New York

autumn 1858–spring 1859 – Samuel Butler moves to Heddon Street, London, to work as an assistant to Reverend Philip Perring

1859
March–September 1859 – William Stanley Jevons returns to Britain via Peru, Panama, Havana, and the United States

June 1859 – Marx published A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

c.June–July 1859 – Marx visits Manchester to see Engels and Dundee to see Peter Imandt and Heise

9 June 1859 – emergence of the British Liberal Party. British Prime Ministers:

Liberal
12 June 1859–18 October 1865 – Henry John Temple (3rd Viscount Palmerston)
29 October 1865–28 June 1866 – John Russell, 1st Earl RussellConservative
28 June 1866–25 February 1868 – Edward Smith-Stanley, 14th Earl of Derby
27 February 1868–1 December 1868 – Benjamin Disraeli is British MinisterLiberal
3 December 1868–17 February 1874 – William Ewart Gladstone is British Minister

30 September 1859 – Samuel Butler leaves England for New Zealand on board the Roman Emperor at Gravesend

October 1859–October 1860 – William Stanley Jevons returns to University College, London, to finish his BA degree

24 November 1859 – Origin of Species published

1860
1860 – Marx became anathema to the German émigré community in London when Karl Vogt accused Marx of being a police informer and having sold out his political allies

c. January 1860 – Julius von Haast moves to Canterbury; he becomes the provincial geologist at Canterbury from 1861 to 1868

27 January 1860 – Samuel Butler arrives in Lyttleton, New Zealand

27 January 1860–15 June 1864 – the novelist Samuel Butler in New Zealand

1860
c. March–April 1860 – Samuel Butler travels up the Waimakariri and sees Arthur’s Pass by looking up the Bealey River
April 1860 – Samuel Butler rides up the Rangitata River
6 September 1860 – Samuel Butler registered his claim to Run 387 between Bush Stream and Forest Creek overlooking the Rangitata River; on 22 September Run 242 is given to him
2 October 1860 – Samuel Butler sets off to the future site of Mesopotamia station from Christchurch
25 December 1860 – Christmas at Mesopotamia

1861
15 February 1861 – Julius von Haast officially becomes Canterbury’s Provincial Geologist
January–February 1861 – Samuel Butler and John Holland Baker explore the sources of the Lawrence, Havelock, Clyde, and Rangitata rivers; this trip is re-told in the beginning of Erewhon
March 1861 – Samuel Butler’s holdings amount to over 40,000 acres, with 2000 sheep; he has 6 workers
April 1861 – Julius von Haast stays with Samuel Butler at Mesopotamia while surveying the region around the Rangitata River, New Zealand
25 May 1861 – the Christchurch The Press begins under the ownership of James Edward Fitzgerald
September 1861 – Samuel Butler’s second hut at Mesopotamia finished; in this year he rides to Mount Somers to visit the Tripps

1862
March 1862 – Samuel Butler takes John Brabazon as a partner
August 1862 – Samuel Butler starts to shift to Christchurch; he corrects proofs of A First Year in Canterbury Settlement
August 1862 – Samuel Butler renounces Christianity
20 December 1862 – Samuel Butler publishes “Darwin on the Origin of Species, A Dialogue” in the Christchurch The Press

1863
13 June 1863 – Samuel Butler publishes “Darwin among the Machines” in The Press newspaper in Christchurch, New Zealand
September 1863 – Samuel Butler mainly based in Christchurch and staying at Carlton Hotel on the Papanui Road; he first meets Charles Paine Pauli
December 1863 – Samuel Butler rides with William Parkerson to Mesopotamia

30 June 1860 – famous debate on Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species between Samuel Wilberforce and Thomas Henry Huxley at Oxford University Museum, during the meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science

6 September 1860 – Samuel Butler registered his claim to Run 387 between Bush Stream and Forest Creek overlooking the Rangitata River; this becomes the Mesopotamia run

2 October 1860 – Samuel Butler sets off to the future site of Mesopotamia station from Christchurch, New Zealand

November 1860 – Marx’s wife Jenny fell seriously ill with smallpox; Marx read Darwin’s revolutionary book On the Origin of Species

6 November 1860 – United States presidential election of 1860; Abraham Lincoln elected

January–February 1861 – Samuel Butler and John Holland Baker explore the sources of the Lawrence, Havelock, Clyde, and Rangitata rivers; this trip is re-told in the beginning of Erewhon

February–May 1861 – Marx travels to Germany, and arrived in Berlin on 18 March, in order to attempt to organise with Lassalle a new radical newspaper in Germany that he could edit. He visited Trier at this time and saw his mother, but the visit did not go well and she broke off contact. Marx visits Holland. Marx arrived back in England in May 1861

19 February 1861 – Russian Tsar Alexander II abolishes serfdom

4 March 1861 – inauguration of Abraham Lincoln as US president (in office from 4 March 1861–15 April 1865)

17 March 1861 – Victor Emmanuel II was proclaimed King of Italy

April 1861 – Julius von Haast stays with Samuel Butler at Mesopotamia while surveying the region around the Rangitata River, New Zealand

12 April 1861–9 May 1865 – American Civil War

20 May 1861 – discovery of gold at Gabriel’s Gully in Otago, the first gold discovery of magnitude in Otago

20 May 1861–1864 – the Otago Gold Rush (the Central Otago Gold Rush), an 1860s gold rush in Central Otago, New Zealand, the largest gold strike in the country; centres in Lawrence (on the Tuapeka River); Arrowtown, Kawarau Gorge, Naseby

August–September 1861 – Marx visits Manchester to see Engels

November 1861 – the Prince of Wales (the future Edward VII) returns from Ireland as an ensign and lives at Madingley Hall, Cambridge; his father Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha hears the rumour of an affair between Edward and an actress Nellie Clifden

15 November 1861 – The Otago Daily Times first published

14 December 1861 – death of Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha

1862
24 January 1862 – the principality of Moldavia and the principality of Wallachia formally unite to create Romania:

Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen Dynasty of Romania
20 April 1866–15 March 1881 – Carol, Domnitor of Romania (king in 1881)
15 March 1881–10 October 1914 – Carol I (born Prince Karl of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen)
10 October 1914 – 20 July 1927 – Ferdinand I

1 May–1 November 1862 – the London International of 1862 (or Great London Exposition, a world’s fair), held beside the gardens of the Royal Horticultural Society, South Kensington, London, England (now the Natural History Museum and the Science Museum)

7 May 1862 – SS Great Eastern sails from Milford Haven to New York

16 May 1862 – Edward Gibbon Wakefield died in Wellington

July 1862 – the German radical Ferdinand Lassalle (1825–1864) visited Marx in London

27 August 1862 – SS Great Eastern scraped an uncharted rock off Long Island, which tore an 83 feet long gush in the outer hull. Since the inner hull was unbroken, ship was able to sail to New York; it then left New York on 6 January 1863

c. September 1862 – Marx sought a job in a railway company but was turned down for bad handwriting

December 1862 – Jenny Marx travels to Paris to try and obtain a loan from an old friend, but fails

1863
1863 – Henry Fawcett publishes the Manual of Political Economy

1863 – Marx starts to have severe health problems involving carbuncles, which may have been caused by an autoimmune disease

27 June 1864 – Arminius Vámbéry appears at the British Royal Geographic Society

29 August 1864 – Samuel Butler arrives in Southampton

31 August 1864 – death of Ferdinand Lassalle in a duel

September 1864 – Samuel Butler lives at No. 15 Clifford’s Inn (off Fleet Street); he lives here for the rest of his life

28 September 1864 – Marx was involved with the International Workingmen’s Association or the First International (1864–1876), which was founded in a workmen’s meeting held in Saint Martin’s Hall, London

17 October 1864 – Arminius Vámbéry leaves London for France

2 November 1864–1870 – Bram Stoker attends Trinity College, Dublin; Stoker graduated with a Bachelor in Arts degree at the Spring Commencements on 1 March 1870

November 1864 – Arminius Vámbéry’s book Travels in Central Asia is published by John Murray

16 December 1864–1 November 1881 – construction of the nave and tower of Christchurch Cathedral, Cathedral Square; construction delayed from 1865–1873; the transepts, chancel and sanctuary finished until 1904

1865
1865–1866 – Gregor Johann Mendel (20 July 1822–6 January 1884) proposes his laws of biological inheritance while at the Augustinian St Thomas’s Abbey in Brno, Margraviate of Moravia

1865 – Jules Verne’s De la terre à la lune (From the Earth to the Moon) is published

1865–1869 – Richard Burton in Brazil

January 1865 – Marx visits Manchester to see Engels

19 March–April 8 1865 – Marx visits Dutch relatives in Zalt-Bommel

April 1865 – William Stanley Jevons’ The Coal Question is published

30 April 1865 – death of Vice-Admiral Robert FitzRoy, captain of HMS Beagle during Charles Darwin’s famous voyage

9 June 1865 – the Staplehurst rail crash, the derailment at Staplehurst, Kent of the London boat train of the South Eastern Railway Folkestone; Charles Dickens with Ellen Ternan and her mother were on board

2–8 September 1867 – 2nd General Congress of the International Workingmen's Association (IWA), held in the city of Lausanne, Switzerland

14 September 1867 – the first volume of Das Kapital published in German

13–23 September 1867 – Marx visits Engels in Manchester

November 1867–April 1868 – Charles Dickens’ second visit to the United States

9 November 1867 – opening of the Lyttelton railway tunnel for the Christchurch–Lyttleton line; the first freight train passes through the tunnel 18 November

14 November 1867 – Henrik Ibsen’s play Peer Gynt published in Copenhagen

by December 1867 – Samuel Butler begins to study art at Heatherley’s at 79 Newman Street by December 1867; Butler also attended the South Kensington Museum and Cary’s (Streatham Street, Bloomsbury), but ceased to go there after he went to Heatherley’s; he meets Eliza Mary Ann Savage at the school

1868
2 April 1868 – Marx’s daughter Laura Marx marries Paul Lafargue

30 May–20 June 1868 – Marx visits Engels in Manchester

6–13 September 1868 – the Brussels Congress of the First International

15 September 1868 – opening of the Otago Museum, Dunedin, New Zealand, from the 1865 New Zealand Exhibition (held in Dunedin); it was originally located in the post office building of The Exchange

8 November 1868 – Friedrich Nietzsche meets Richard Wagner at a party in Leipzig

3 December 1868–17 February 1874 – William Ewart Gladstone is British Minister

1869
1869–1871 – Richard Francis Burton in Damascus

January 1869 – Matthew Arnold publishes Culture and Anarchy

March 1869–June 1870 – Jules Verne’s Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea) is published and serialized in the periodical Magasin d’Éducation et de Récréation

May–14 June 1869 – Marx visits Engels in Manchester with his daughter Eleanor

28 May 1869 – Friedrich Nietzsche’s first lecture as Assistant Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Basel (May 1869–2 May 1879) on “On the Personality of Homer”; full Professor in April 1870

1 June 1869 – Richard Francis Burton arrives in England from Brazil

30 June 1869 – Engels retires from Ermen and Engels

August 1869 – John Ruskin appointed as the first Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford University

6–12 September 1869 – Basle Congress of the International Workingmen's Association

2–7 September 1872 – 5th congress of the First International meets in the Hague; Bakunin was expelled from the International and the General Council was moved to New York, which effectively killed the International so that it dissolved in 1876

1873–1874 – the Bihar famine of 1873–1874 (or Bengal famine of 1873–1874), a famine in British India after a drought in Bihar, parts of Bengal, the North-Western Provinces and Oudh; a relief effort was organized by Sir Richard Temple, Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal

1 January 1873 – Dunedin’s first railway, the Port Chalmers Branch, opened

9 May 1873 – the Vienna Stock Exchange crashes, and a number of bank failures in Austria occur

22 May–June 1873 – Marx visits Manchester to see Dr Gumpert

16 June 1873 – Canterbury Provincial Council Ordinance establishes University of Canterbury in Christchurch; from 1874 to 1961 University of New Zealand was New Zealand’s only degree-granting university, and included Otago and Canterbury

June 1873 – the second German edition of volume I of Das Kapital is published in Hamburg

June 1873 – Heinrich Schliemann and his wife Sophia Schliemann discover a cache of golden bracelets, diadems, earrings and rings at Hissarlik; it is dubbed “Priam’s Treasure”

June 1873 – George Bernard Shaw leaves Dublin for London

June 1873 – Karl Marx sends Charles Darwin the second German edition of Das Kapital; Thomas Huxley visits Charles Darwin at Downe house, before Huxley’s trip to the Continent

6 June 1873 – the Schönbrunn Convention is signed by Russia and Austria-Hungary

19 July 1873 – death of Samuel Wilberforce, the Anglican bishop and third son of William Wilberforce

Autumn 1873 – Freud enters Vienna University as medical student

September 1873 – Carl Menger becomes non-tenured associated professor in the Faculty of Law and Political Science at the University of Vienna (1873– 1903)

early September 1873 – Marx’s daughter Eleanor returned to London

18 September 1873 – the American company Jay Cooke & Company declares bankruptcy; the Panic of 1873 begins

20 September 1873 – the New York Stock Exchange closes for ten days starting on this day

1 October 1873 – Charles Darwin writes a letter to Karl Marx, thanking him for the gift of the second German edition of Das Kapital

22 October 1873 – Bismarck establishes the League of the Three Emperors between the German Empire, Russia, and Austria-Hungary from 1873 to 1878; it was dissolved over territorial disputes in the Balkans in 1878; revived in June 1881

November 1873 – the Harvard philosopher John Fiske visits Charles Darwin at Downe house

18–21 November 1873 – Irish Home Rule League founded

24 November 1873 – Marx leaves London for a spa in Harrogate (near Leeds in North England), owing to bad heath; he is accompanied by Eleanor “Tussy” Marx and visits Manchester twice during the holiday; he stays until December 15

January 1874 – Charles Darwin visits London to consult Dr Andrew Clark; Darwin attends a séance at the home of his brother Erasmus

31 January–17 February 1874 – the United Kingdom general election of 1874; the results:

Party | Seats Won
Conservative | 350
Liberal | 242
Home Rule | 60

Benjamin Disraeli’s Conservatives win the majority of seats in the House of Commons, even though the Liberals win a majority of the votes cast, and Benjamin Disraeli becomes UK Prime Minister on 20 February 1874

February 1874 – Heinrich Schliemann publishes Trojanische Alterthümer

20 February 1874–21 April 1880 – Benjamin Disraeli is Prime Minister of the UK

21 February 1874–2 April 1878 – Robert Gascoyne-Cecil (3rd Marquess of Salisbury) is UK Secretary of State for India

c. 7 March 1874 – New Zealand University Act

April 1874 – William Stanley Jevons’ Principles of Science is published

April 1874 – Charles Darwin sends the second edition of the Descent of Man to the printers

15 April 1874 – Lord Randolph Churchill marries Jennie Jerome (an American from New York and daughter of Leonard Jerome)

10 June 1874 – Samuel Butler sails for Montreal

June–c. 17 July 1874 – Samuel Butler in Montreal

June 1874 – teaching begins at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, in its first term, with five part-time lecturers

June–July 1874 – Richard Francis Burton becomes seriously in Trieste

July 1874 – Marx took a three-week vacation in Ryde on the Isle of Wight

c. 17 July–5 August 1874 – Samuel Butler returns to London

August 1874 – Charles Darwin and his family take a holiday in Southampton

c. August–21 September 1874 – Richard Francis Burton in Padua to see a doctor and Battaglia to recover from illness

5 August 1874–May 1875 – Samuel Butler in Montreal, Canada

7 August 1874 – the UK Public Worship Regulation Act 1874, introduced as a private member’s bill by the Archbishop of Canterbury Archibald Campbell Tait, to restrict the ritualism of Anglo-Catholicism and the Oxford Movement within the Church of England, is given royal assent

15 August 1874 – Marx departed for the spa town of Karlsbad in Bohemia (which he also visited in 1875 and 1876) with his daughter Tussy

August–19 September 1874 – Marx in Karlsbad (a spa resort, now Karlovy Vary in the Czech Republic); before 8 September Marx breaks with Louis (Ludwig) Kugelmann

September 1874 – Marx went on a two-week tour of German cities and travels to Dresden, Leipzig (where he met Liebknecht), Berlin and Hamburg; he meets his publisher Meissner

21 April 1875 – Charles Stewart Parnell elected to the House of Commons

12 May–4 December 1875 – Richard Francis Burton in England

June 1875–spring 1876 – Andrew Crosse’s journey from Budapest along the Danube to Romania and Transylvania

June–July 1875 – Heinrich Schliemann visits Britain and gives a lecture at the Society of Antiquaries on 24 June

c. 6–30 July 1875 – Richard Francis Burton in Iceland

9 July 1875–4 August 1877 – Herzegovina Uprising, an uprising of ethnic Serbs against the Ottoman Empire, firstly in Herzegovina and then in Bosnia

July 1875–3 March 1878 – Balkan Wars of 1875–1878:

(1) July 1875 – Herzegovina Uprising (9 July 1875–4 August 1877), an uprising of ethnic Serbs against the Ottoman Empire, firstly in Herzegovina and then in Bosnia(2) April 1876 – April Uprising of Bulgarians (April–May 1876) against the Ottoman Empire(3) June 1876 – Montenegrin–Ottoman War (18 June 1876–19 February 1878), which ends in Montenegrin victory(4) June 1876 – Serbo-Turkish War (30 June 1876–3 March 1878)(5) December 1876 – Constantinople Conference of the Great Powers (namely, Russia, Germany, France, Britain, Austria-Hungary and Italy) held in Istanbul (23 December 1876–20 January 1877) (6) April 1877 – Russo-Turkish War (24 April 1877–3 March 1878)(7) 3 March 1878 – the preliminary Treaty of San Stefano(8) 13 June–13 July 1878 – Congress of Berlin(9) 13 July 1878 – Treaty of Berlin signed at the Radziwill Palace in Berlin

28 May–3 August 1876 – Charles Darwin begins to write his “Recollections”; revised in April 1881

June 1876 – Arthur J. Evans publishes Through Bosnia and the Herzegovina on Foot during the Insurrection, August and September 1875

June–July 1876 – Serbia and Montenegro declare war on Turkey

c. 18 June 1876 – Richard Francis Burton and his wife arrive back in Trieste

18 June 1876–19 February 1878 – Montenegrin–Ottoman War, which ends in Montenegrin victory

25–26 June 1876 – Battle of the Little Bighorn. Victory of the forces of the Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho tribes (led by Crazy Horse and Chief Gall) against the 7th Cavalry Regiment of the United States Army

c. August 1876–1878 – the Great Famine of 1876–1878 in India (or Southern India Famine of 1876–1878 or the Madras famine of 1877), a famine in India beginning in 1876 and affecting Madras, Mysore, Hyderabad, and Bombay for two years

7 August–December 1876 – Heinrich Schliemann’s excavations at Mycenae

10 August 1876 – John Neville Keynes receives a telegram about his appointment to a Fellowship of Pembroke College, Cambridge (which he held from August 1876–12 August 1882)

12 August 1876 – Friedrich Nietzsche travels to Bayreuth to see the first performance of the Ring cycle; Kaiser Wilhelm also attends this

13 August 1876 – beginning of the famous 1876 Bayreuth Festival and performance of Wagner’s Das Rheingold, prelude of Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelungen) at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus. The following plays are performed:

Marx arrives in Nuremberg at about 5 pm on 14 August and was unable to find accommodation in Nuremberg; he travels on to Weiden and arrives at midnight but finds no accommodation there either, because of the festival at Bayreuth; first Bayreuth Festival continues until 30 August 1876

October 1876 – William Stanley Jevons gives his first lecture as Professor of Political Economy at University College, London (from October 1876–May 1881); Jevons moves to The Chestnuts, Branch Hill, Hampstead Heath

October 1876–August 1881 – Arthur Conan Doyle studies at the University of Edinburgh Medical School; Arthur Conan Doyle meets the Scottish lecturer Joseph Bell in 1877, who is the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes

November 1876–August 1877 – Henry Morton Stanley’s expedition up the Lualaba river to the Congo River

November 1876 – Eugene Schuyler, the American Consul in Istanbul, publishes a report about the Bulgarian atrocities after his own investigation

30 November 1876 – Heinrich Schliemann opens the fifth of the Shaft Graves at Mycenae, and finds a tomb he believes to be that of Agamemnon; Schliemann reportedly sends a telegram to the king of Greece saying “I have gazed on the face of Agamemnon”

December 1876 – Bram Stoker gives a favourable review of Henry Irving’s Hamlet at the Theatre Royal in Dublin

22 May 1877 – the act officially declaring the full independence of Romania signed by Prince Carol I

mid-1877 – new buildings of Canterbury College, New Zealand, completed

June 1877 – Arthur Evans meets Edward Augustus Freeman in Ragusa

c. 14 June–July 1877 – Edward A. Freeman visits Dalmatia

18 June 1877 – Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant’s trial at the Old Bailey for a pamphlet on contraception

July 1877 – Alfred Marshall marries Mary Paley

25 July 1877–1883 – Alfred Marshall is Professor of Political Economy at Bristol University College; a hiatus from 1881–1882 while on holiday in Sicily

August–September 1877 – Marx, his wife Jenny and daughter Eleanor travel for a holiday to Neuenahr, a spa town in Rhenish Prussia

August 1877 – establishment of the Dogberry Club, a Shakespeare reading group

9 August 1877 – Henry Morton Stanley and his men reach the Portuguese outpost of Boma around 100 kilometres from the mouth of the Congo River on the Atlantic Ocean

11 August 1877 – the new building of the Otago Museum on 419 Great King Street was opened; the foundation was laid in December 1874; management of the museum passes to University of Otago in 1877; in 1955 a trust board becomes owner

17–18 November 1877 – Charles Darwin visits Cambridge university and given an honorary Doctorate of Laws

21 November 1877 – Thomas A. Edison announces the development of the phonograph

December 1877–May 1878 – Edward A. Freeman visits Italy and Sicily

6 December 1877 – first sound recording is made by Thomas Edison

7 December 1877 – Thomas A. Edison demonstrates the gramophone

6 December 1877–12 May 1878 – Richard Francis Burton in Egypt and on expedition to Midian; he leaves for Suez on 6 December; he sails from Suez on 10 December; on 19 December they land at El-Muwaylah; 21 December he leaves for Aynunah; Maghair Shu’ayb; Makna (25 January–2 February 1878); El-Akabah, South Midian, Shuwak, Ziba, El Wijh, El-Haura, Bada plain, El Wijh (5–12 April 1878), Suez (20 April 1878), Zagazig, Cairo (22 April–10 May 1878), Alexandria

25 May 1878 – Gilbert and Sullivan’s H.M.S. Pinafore first performed at the Opera Comique, London

26 May 1878 – the Turkish Sultan agrees to the Cyprus Convention

June 1878 – Oscar Wilde takes his final exams at Oxford

June 1878 – Sir Henry Morton Stanley’s Through the Dark Continent published

4 June 1878 – the Cyprus Convention, the secret agreement between the United Kingdom and the Ottoman Empire which granted Cyprus to Great Britain in return for a guarantee against Russian aggression, is formally signed

13 June–13 July 1878 – Congress of Berlin

July 1878 – Engels published the Anti-Dühring (1878), which was first published in serial form from January 3 1877 to July 7 1878 in the journal Vorwärts

31 August 1878 – the famous Victorian actor Henry Irving takes the lease of the Lyceum Theatre, London; the Irish writer Bram Stoker becomes his business manager in October

19 August 1878 – Richard Francis Burton gives a lecture on the land of Midian in Dublin

September–November 1878 – Heinrich Schliemann returns to Troy

4 September 1878 – publication of second edition of Friedrich Nietzsche’s book The Birth of Tragedy, or: Hellenism and Pessimism, which was prepared and printed in 1874

12 September 1878 – Lydia “Lizzie” Burns dies

c. September 1878–1 September 1880 – Second Anglo–Afghan War:

22 July 1878 – Russian envoys arrive in Kabul, capital of Sher Ali Khan, the Amir of Afghanistan
14 August 1878 – the British demand that Sher Ali accept a British mission
September 1878 – a British diplomatic mission on the way to Kabul is turned back near the east of the Khyber Pass; this triggers the Second Anglo–Afghan War
21 November 1878 – a British force of 50,000 invades Afghanistan at three different points
20 December 1878 – British advance to Jalalabad
26 May 1879 – the Treaty of Gandamak, signed by King Mohammad Yaqub Khan of Afghanistan and Sir Louis Cavagnari, officially ends the first phase of the Second Anglo-Afghan War; Afghanistan cedes frontier areas to Britain; the Durand Line forms the border between Afghanistan and the British Raj
24 July 1879 – British mission under Sir Louis Cavagnari arrives in Kabul
3 September 1879 – uprising in Kabul and slaughter of Sir Louis Cavagnari, the British representative, along with his guards and staff
6 October 1879 – Major General Sir Frederick Roberts leads the Kabul Field Force and defeats the Afghan Army at Char Asiab
8 October 1879 – Major General Sir Frederick Roberts occupies Kabul
December 1879 – uprising of 10,000 Afghans attacks British forces near Kabul in the Siege of the Sherpur Cantonment
27 July 1880 – the Battle of Maiwand; the Afghan force of Ayub Khan defeats British and Indian troops under Brigadier-General George Burrows
1 September 1880 – the Battle of Kandahar, the last major conflict of the war and a decisive British victory, between British forces under Frederick Sleigh Roberts and Afghan forces led by Ayub Khan.

4–14 September 1878 – Marx is in Malvern, Worcester, with his wife, his daughter Jenny and his grandson

1879 – Julius von Haast publishes Geology of the Provinces of Canterbury and Westland, New Zealand

1879 – the University of Otago, New Zealand, moves to its modern site when the neo-Gothic Clocktower building was completed

1879 – Carl Menger appointed as chair of law and political economy at the University of Vienna (1879–1903)

1879 – Charles Paine Pauli making around 700–1,000 pounds a year from his law profession

11 January–4 July 1879 – Anglo-Zulu War between the British Empire and the Zulu Kingdom:

1 September 1873– July 1879 – Cetshwayo is king of the Zulu
12 April 1877 – British annexation proclamation of Transvaal Boer Republic
December 1878 – Sir Bartle Frere presents Cetshwayo with an ultimatum to disband the Zulu army and accept a British resident
January 1879 – British force under Lieutenant General Frederick Augustus Thesiger (2nd Baron Chelmsford) invades Zululand
22 January 1879 – battle of Isandlwana, first encounter of the Anglo–Zulu War between the British Empire and the Zulu Kingdom
22–23 January 1879 – battle of Rorke’s Drift: 150 British troops under the command of Lieutenant John Chard of the Royal Engineers and Lieutenant Gonville Bromhead defeat 3,000 to 4,000 Zulu warriors
22 January–3 April 1879 – siege of Eshowe: Colonel Charles Pearson besieged at Eshowe (Fort Ekowe) for two months by the Zulus
12 March 1879 – battle of Intombe between Zulus and British soldiers defending a supply convoy
28 March 1879 – battle of Hlobane near Vryheid
29 March 1879 – battle of Kambula in which Zulus attack the British camp at Kambula: a decisive Zulu defeat and turning point of the Anglo-Zulu War
2 April 1879 – Lord Chelmsford’s attacked en route to Eshowe at Gingindlovu with Zulu defeat
3 April 1879 – lifting of the siege of Eshowe
June 1879 – second invasion of Zululand under Lord Chelmsford
July 1879 – Sir Garnet Wolseley arrives in South Africa
4 July 1879 – the battle of Ulundi (the Zulu capital), last major battle of the Anglo-Zulu War; the British defeat the Zulu and raze Ulundi
28 August 1879 – the Zulu king Cetshwayo captured and sent to Cape Town

after January 1879 – Midlothian campaign

22 January 1879 – Battle of Isandlwana, first encounter of the Anglo–Zulu War between the British Empire and the Zulu Kingdom

22–23 January 1879 – Battle of Rorke’s Drift, a battle in the Anglo-Zulu War. Around 150 British and colonial troops under the command of Lieutenant John Chard of the Royal Engineers and Lieutenant Gonville Bromhead successfully defended the mission station of Rorke’s Drift from 3,000 to 4,000 Zulu warriors

February 1879 – Oscar Wilde moves into 13 Salisbury Street, London; Wilde applies for a ticket at the British Museum on 24 February 1879

8 February 1879 – Richard Francis Burton meets Bram Stoker in Grafton Street at Irving’s house; Stoker meets Burton again on 21 February 1879 at a party at Bailey’s Hotel, South Kensington

September 1880 – Hall Caine first meets Dante Gabriel Rossetti in his home at Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, London

18 September 1880 – Henry Irving’s production of The Corsican Brothers opened at the Lyceum

1 October 1880–30 April 1881 – Melbourne International Exhibition (8th World’s Fair) officially recognised by the Bureau International des Expositions (BIE), held in the Royal Exhibition Building, Carlton Gardens, Melbourne

October 1880 – William Stanley Jevons decides to resign as Professor of Political Economy at University College, London

20 December 1880–23 March 1881 – First Boer War (First Anglo-Boer War, or the Transvaal War) between Britain and the South African Republic (Transvaal Republic); British defeated and the second independence of the South African Republic

1880s–1890s – the London season runs from after Christmas to c. late June; this coincides with sitting of Parliament

1880s

1881
1881–1884 – Anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire in Ukraine and Poland)

23 April 1881 – Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience first performed at the Opera Comique, London; the play moved to the famous Savoy Theatre on 10 October 1881

26 April 1881 – the Kiev pogrom of 1881 in Russia

28 April 1881 – Billy the Kid (born Henry McCarty, but known as William H. Bonney) escapes from jail in Mesilla, New Mexico, United States, after being convicted of the murder of Lincoln County Sheriff William J. Brady

May 1881 – William Stanley Jevons resigns as Professor of Political Economy at University College, London

May 1881–June 1889 – Alfred Russel Wallace lives at Nutwood Cottage which he had built at Godalming, Surrey

2 and 9 May 1881 – revival of Othello at the Lyceum

June 1881 – Charles Darwin visits the Lake district with his wife Emma and the Litchfields

7 June 1881 – first meeting of the Social Democratic Federation (SDF), first socialist political party in Britain, organised
by H. M. Hyndman, and whose members included William Morris, George Lansbury and Eleanor Marx

18 June 1881 – the Three Emperors’ Alliance (June 1881–1887) between the German Empire, Russia, and Austria-Hungary is revived

July 1881 – Eleanor Marx decides to become an actress

14 July 1881 – Billy the Kid (born Henry McCarty, but known as William H. Bonney) shot and killed by Sheriff Pat Garrett in Fort Sumner, New Mexico, United States

August 1881 – Charles Darwin visits London to sit for an oil painting

August–September 1881 – Marx and his wife visit Argenteuil near Paris

3 August 1881 – Charles Darwin dines with the Prince of Wales and the Crown Prince of Germany in London; Charles Bradlaugh ejected from the House of Commons

16 August 1881 – Marx gets a letter about his daughter Tussy’s break down, and returns to London

February 1882 – Marx goes to Argenteuil with Eleanor Marx to see his daughter Jenny

15 February–late May 1882 – the voyage of the ship the Dunedin, which sails from Port Chalmers, Dunedin to London with refrigerated lamb and mutton; the first successful frozen meat shipment from New Zealand

20 February 1882 – Marx arrives in Algiers and spent 3 months there, with stopovers in Argenteuil and Marseille on the way

2 March 1882 – the Austro-Hungarian government issues a deportation notice to Arthur Evans in Dubrovnik, accusing him of being a spy

8 March 1882 – début of Henry Irving’s production of Romeo and Juliet at the Lyceum, with Ellen Terry as Juliet

27 March 1882 – the Egypt Exploration Society (EES) founded by Amelia Edwards and Reginald Stuart Poole at a meeting held in the British Museum; its purpose is to excavate Egypt and Sudan

9 April 1882 – death of Dante Gabriel Rossetti

19 April 1882 – death of Charles Darwin

26 April 1882 – state funeral of Charles Darwin at Westminster Abbey

early May 1882 – Marx leaves Algiers for France via Monte Carlo

26 May–29 August 1882 – beginning of the second Bayreuth Festival with Richard Wagner’s play Parsifal

summer 1882 – Marx in Artenteuil

June–13 September 1882 – the Anglo-Egyptian War between Egyptian forces under Ahmed ‘Urabi (or Ahmad Arabi) and the UK:

20 May 1882 – British and French warships arrive near Alexandria
11 June 1882 – anti-Christian riot in Alexandria kills 50 Europeans
11–13 July 1882 – British fleet bombards Alexandria and occupies the city
3 August 1882 – British army of 40,000 led by Garnet Wolseley invades the Suez Canal Zone
5 August 1882 – battle of Kafr El Dawwar between an Egyptian army and British forces headed by Sir Archibald Alison
8 August 1882 – troops from India and England arrive for weeks at Suez
15 August 1882 – Sir Garnet Wolseley arrives at Alexandria
20 August 1882 – British occupy Ismailia
13 September 1882 – Battle of Tell El Kebir (at the western end of Wadi Tumilat): Sir Garnet Wolseley attacks Egyptian forces at night near Tell El Kebir; Arabi flees to Cairo
14 September 1882 – British forces capture Cairo
15 September 1882 – Garnet Wolseley enters Cairo
October 1882 – British army begins to leave for England

30 June 1882 – Eleanor Marx attends the annual celebration of the Browning Society at University College London

July 1882–mid-August – Eleanor Marx goes to Artenteuil

31 July 1882 – Sigmund Freud begins clinical training at the General Hospital of Vienna

August–September 1882 – Samuel Butler goes to Paris, Turin, S. Pietro in the valley of Susa, near Turin; he sketches the Sanctuary of Sammichele; Aosta (September), Milan, Arona, Varese, Bergamo, Verona; he is joined by Henry Festing Jones from Aosta to Bergamo

August 1882 – Marx then went from Artenteuil to Vevey in Switzerland, then returning to London

August 1882 – Friedrich Nietzsche publishes The Gay Science

13 August 1882 – death of William Stanley Jevons whilst bathing near Hastings

14 September 1882 – Bram Stoker attempts to save a man attempting suicide while on a Thames ferry

20 September 1882 – Rudyard Kipling sails for India

October 1882 – Marx returns to London

11 October 1882 – début of Henry Irving’s production of Much Ado about Nothing at the Lyceum; production continues until June 1883

11 October 1882 – Eleanor Marx goes to the Lyceum to see Henry Irving’s production of Much Ado about Nothing

18 October 1882–9 March 1889 – Rudyard Kipling in India; from March to October 1889, he visits Japan and America:

1883–1889 – Kipling works for the Civil and Military Gazette newspaper in Lahore and The Pioneer in Allahabad
summer 1883 – Kipling visits Shimla (Simla), the summer capital of British India; he does so annually from 1885 to 1888
1888 – Kipling publishes the story collection The Phantom ’Rickshaw and Other Tales

November 1882–January 1883 – Marx goes to Ventnor on the Isle of Wight

August 1883 – Samuel Butler travels to Honfleur, Caen, Bayeux, Mont St. Michel, Lisieux, and returns by sea from Havre to London

26–27 August 1883 – the famous 1883 eruption of Krakatoa in the Dutch East Indies

September 1883 – Eleanor Marx goes on a holiday to Eastbourne with Engels and Helene “Lenchen” Demuth; after her return to London the Marx family home at 41 Maitland Park Road (44 Maitland Street) is vacated and Eleanor moves into 122 Great Coram Street, Bloomsbury

September 1883–6 May 1907 – Evelyn Baring (1st Earl of Cromer) is 1st Consul-General of Egypt

October 1883 – socialist debating group that would become the Fabian Society formed in London

7 October 1883 – official Royal Ball of Inauguration at Peleș Castle near Sinaia, in Prahova County, Romania, of King Carol I

11 October 1883 – Henry Irving leaves Britain for his American tour

October 1883–April 1884 – Henry Irving’s first American tour:

21 October 1883 – Henry Irving’s press conference in the saloon of the Yosemite with Ellen Terry in New York harbour
29 October 1883 – Henry Irving’s American theatrical tour opens in New York with The Bells
26 November 1883 – Henry Irving’s American tour opens in Philadelphia
20 March 1884 – Henry Irving and Bram Stoker meet Walt Whitman
Washington, Baltimore, Toronto, Niagara Falls, Chicago, Boston
March 1884 – New York

29 October 1883 – Henry Irving’s American theatrical tour begins in New York

2 December 1884 – the doctor Frederick Treves presents Joseph Merrick (the Elephant man) to the Pathological Society of London at 53 Berners Street, Bloomsbury

27 December 1884 – split in the Social Democratic Federation; William Morris, Belfort Bax, Eleanor Marx, and Edward Aveling resign and form the Socialist League on 29 December 1884, funded by William Morris

December 1884 – John Ruskin leaves Slade Professorship of Fine Arts in protest at vivisection in Oxford; resigns March 1885

31 August 1886 – Aveling and Eleanor Marx leave Liverpool for an American trip

9 September 1886 – Aveling and Eleanor Marx arrive in New York

11 September 1886 – beginning of second run of Henry Irving’s Faust at the Lyceum theatre; productions runs from
11 September to 22 April 1887

2 October 1886 – Aveling and Eleanor set out from New York on a 3 month speaking tour

28 October 1886 – statue of liberty unveiled

31 October 1886 – new edition of Friedrich Nietzsche’s book The Birth of Tragedy, or: Hellenism and Pessimism (Die Geburt der Tragödie, Oder: Griechentum und Pessimismus), with a new preface called “An Attempt at Self-Criticism”

14 December 1886–6 April 1887 – Edward Augustus Freeman visits Sicily

20 December 1886 – Lord Randolph Churchill resigns as Chancellor of the Exchequer of the Tory government of Lord Salisbury

1887
1887–1888 – the British Royal Commission on the Values of Gold and Silver

1887 – Édouard Naville excavates Tell el-Yahudiyeh and Saft el-Hinna

4 January 1887 – Aveling and Eleanor arrive in Liverpool from New York; they stay with Engels and move to 65 Chancery Lane

22 January 1887 – Gilbert and Sullivan’s play Ruddigore; or, The Witch’s Curse opens at the Savoy Theatre

January 1887 – Friedrich Engels publishes an English translation of volume 1 of Das Kapital from the 1883 German third edition, translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (who had become the partner of Marx’s daughter Eleanor “Tussy” Marx in 1884)

March–April 1887 – Charles Stewart Parnell involved in the Pigott forgeries in The Times

March 1887 – Alfred Marshall publishes the “Remedies for Fluctuations in General Prices” in Contemporary Review

April 1887 – Samuel Butler travels to Ypres

22 April 1887 – end of second run of Henry Irving’s Faust

30 May 1887 – Aveling and Eleanor resign from the Socialist League

spring – Aveling and Eleanor move to Dodwell, Warwickshire

1 June 1887 – Henry Irving’s production of Werner at the Lyceum

18 June 1887 – Reinsurance Treaty signed, between Germany and Russia, organised by Otto von Bismarck after the German-Austrian-Russian League of the Three Emperors collapsed

20 June 1887 – the Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria was celebrated, to mark the 50th anniversary of her accession

24 June 1887 – publication of a new edition of Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Gay Science

16 August 1887 – death of Julius von Haast in Christchurch, New Zealand

October 1887 – Eleanor Marx returns to London from Dodwell

November 1887 – Tsar Alexander III visited Berlin

7 November 1887–26 March 1888 – Henry Irving’s third north American theatrical tour begins in New York:

7 November 1887–10 December 1887 – New York
12–23 December 1887 – Philadelphia
26 December 1887–21 January 1888 – Chicago
23 January 1888–18 February 1888 – Boston
20 February 1888–24 March 1888 – New York

8 November 1887 – government bans meetings in Trafalgar square

13 November 1887 – Bloody Sunday; demonstration towards Trafalgar square with Eleanor Marx and Aveling broken up by military and police

16 November 1887 – publication of Friedrich Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals

December 1887 – publication of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel A Study in Scarlet in Beeton’s Christmas Annual 1887 in which Sherlock Holmes appears for the first time; first published as a book in July 1888

1888
1888 – Kipling publishes the story collection The Phantom ’Rickshaw and Other Tales, with the short story “The Man who would be King”

1888–1890 – Heinrich Schliemann’s last excavation at Troy

1888 – Francis Ysidro Edgeworth appointed as Tooke Professor of Political Economy, King’s College, London (1888–1891)

16 January 1888 – Alfred Marshall appears before the British “Royal Commission on the Value of Gold and Silver” (instituted in 1887) and questioned about the economic conditions of the 1870s and 1880s in Britain

9 February 1888 – Frederick III, soon to become German emperor, underwent a tracheotomy for throat cancer

9 March 1888 – the death of the German Emperor Wilhelm I (king of Prussia from 2 January 1861)

9 March 1888–15 June 1888 – reign of the German Emperor Frederick III

11 March–14 March 1888 – the Great Blizzard of 1888 on the eastern coast of the United States of America

26 March 1888 – Henry Irving sailed for England after the end of his third north American theatrical tour

8 April–10 December 1888 – the 1888 Barcelona Universal Exposition, held in the Parc de la Ciutadella, Barcelona

14 April 1888 – revival of Faust at the Lyceum theatre

15 April 1888 – death of Matthew Arnold

17 April 1888–December 1892 – Winston Churchill was sent to Harrow School

April 1888 – Beatrice Potter (later Webb) works in an East End tailoring sweatshop

15 June 1888 – Wilhelm II becomes German Emperor

summer – Eleanor Marx in Dodwell, Warwickshire

23 July 1888 – performance of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (The Mastersingers of Nuremberg) at Bayreuth

January 1891 – John Neville Keynes publishes The Scope and Method of Political Economy

31 January 1891 – famous Royal English Opera House opened (renamed the Palace Theatre of Varieties in 1892)

21 February 1891 – Francis Ysidro Edgeworth appointed to the Drummond chair of Political Economy, Oxford, and chosen as a fellow of All Souls (1891–1922)

25 June 1891 – first story of Arthur Conan Doyle’s character Sherlock Holmes published in The Strand Magazine

June 1891 – first meeting of Lord Alfred Douglas (1870–1945) and Oscar Wilde

June 1891 – Mark Twain and his family move to Europe and live there until 1895; Twain lived in France, Germany, and Italy; in Berlin in winter 1891–1892; Florence in fall and winter 1892–1893; and Paris in winter and spring 1893–1894 and 1894–1895

June 1892–29 August 1896 – Rudyard Kipling and his wife live in America

4–26 July 1892 – the 1892 United Kingdom general election; the Liberal Unionists under the leadership of Joseph Chamberlain won 46 seats. The UK Conservatives under Lord Salisbury did not win a majority, but were defeated in a vote of no confidence on 11 August 1892. William Gladstone formed a minority government in coalition with the Irish Nationalists

5–8 July 1892 – Arminius Vámbéry given a Degree at the Tercentenary of Dublin University; he gives a speech heard by Bram Stoker

23 July 1892 – marriage of Sidney Webb and Beatrice Potter

15 August 1892 – William Gladstone becomes British Prime Minister

October 1892–September 1893 – Jules Verne’s Le Château des Carpathes (The Carpathian Castle) published in English

6 October 1892 – death of Alfred Tennyson

10 November 1892 – opening night of Henry Irving’s production of King Lear at the Lyceum theatre

December 1892 – Winston Churchill left Harrow

1893
14–16 January 1893 – foundation conference of the Independent Labour Party

6 February 1893 – opening night of Henry Irving’s production of Becket at the Lyceum theatre

February 1893 – Winston Churchill sent to a “crammer” school in London to pass entrance examination for Sandhurst

February 1893 – Oscar Wilde’s play Salome first published in French

26 February 1893 – Philadelphia and Reading Railroad goes bankrupt, which later triggers the US Panic of 1893

April 1893 – Samuel Butler in Brussels and Dinant

19 April 1893 – Oscar Wilde’s play A Woman of No Importance opens at London’s Haymarket Theatre

11 March 1893 – Arthur Evans’ wife dies

May 1893–1915 – Mahatma Gandhi in South Africa

1 May 1893–30 October 1893 – World’s Columbian Exposition, world’s fair held in Chicago in 1893

5 May 1893 – Black Friday in the US, the disastrous crash of the New York Stock Exchange; Panic of 1893

summer 1893 – Bram Stoker takes a holiday in the village of Cruden Bay

summer 1893 – Walter Pater moves back to Oxford

summer 1893 – Henry Irving and Ellen Terry take a holiday in Canada; proceed to San Fancisco

6–13 August 1893 – the Zurich Socialist and Labour Congress, the 3rd congress of the Second International. Friedrich Engels gave a closing address; Eleanor Marx attends

16 August 1893 – death of Jean-Martin Charcot

1 September 1893 – Churchill enters Royal Military College, Sandhurst

September 1893 – Lenin moved to Saint Petersburg

4 September 1893–21 March 1894 – Henry Irving’s 4th American tour; opened in San Francisco with The Bells, and includes Chicago, Seattle, Portland, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Washington, Boston, New York

8 September 1893 – the Government of Ireland Bill 1893 (or Second Home Rule Bill) was rejected by the House of Lords on its third reading. The Bill had been passed in the House of Commons on 1 September 1893 by 301 votes in favour to 267 against

13–29 October 1893 – Russian fleet visits French port of Toulon, a sign of the growing Franco-Russian military alliance

December 1893–February 1894 – Lord Alfred Douglas in Egypt

December 1893 – Arthur Conan Doyle’s story “The Adventure of the Final Problem” in which Sherlock Holmes dies is published in The Strand Magazine

27 December 1893 – Franco-Russian military alliance ratified

1894
1894 – publication of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book

February 1894 – Oscar Wilde’s play Salome first published in English, with illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley

2 March 1894 – William Gladstone leaves office as British Prime Minister

19 March 1894 – Arthur Evans first visits Knossos on Crete

21 March 1894 – Henry Irving and Ellen Terry return to England after their 4th American tour

14 April 1894 – revival of Faust by Henry Irving at the Lyceum

April–August 1894 – Rudyard Kipling and his wife visit England on a holiday

c. 19 April 1894 – the future Tsar Nicholas II and his uncle Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich travel to Coburg, Germany to attend the wedding of Ernest Louis (Grand Duke of Hesse) and Princess Victoria Melita of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. The other guests were Queen Victoria, Kaiser Wilhelm II and his mother, the Prince of Wales, and the Duke and Duchess of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha

August–October 1894 – Oscar Wilde spends a summer holiday in Worthing where he writes The Importance of Being Earnest

summer 1894 – Bram Stoker takes a second holiday in the village of Cruden Bay

August 1894 – Engels on holiday in Eastbourne suffers a stroke

1 August 1894–17 April 1895 – First Sino-Japanese War between the Qing Empire of China and the Empire of Japan, over control of Korea; Japanese victory

September 1894 – publication of The Green Carnation by Robert Hichens, a parody of Oscar Wilde

21 September to 8 December 1894 – provincial tour of Henry Irving; first production of Henry Irving’s A Story of Waterloo played at the Princes Theatre, Bristol, on September 21, 1894; London performance at the Garrick Theatre on 17 December 1894

October 1894 – the third volume of Das Kapital published by Engels

1 November 1894 – Tsar Alexander III dies

1 November 1894 – accession of Nicholas II of Russia (reign: 1 November 1894–15 March 1917)

3 April 1895 – opening of the libel trial of the Marquess of Queensberry

17 April 1895 – Treaty of Shimonoseki between the Empire of Japan and the Qing Empire; Taiwan ceded to Japan as well as the Liaodong Peninsula (which was subsequently acquired by Russia)

23 April 1895 – Tripartite Intervention or Triple Intervention, diplomatic intervention by Russia, Germany, and France which forced Japan to withdraw from the Liaodong Peninsula

4 May 1895 – performances of The Story of Waterloo and Don Quixote at the Lyceum

25 May 1895 – announcement of Henry Irving’s knighthood

25 May 1895 – Oscar Wilde convicted and sentenced to two years hard labour

June 1895 – Engels, Laura Marx and Eleanor take a holiday in Eastbourne

21 June 1895 – Lord Rosebery resigns as British Prime Minister

29 June 1895 – death of Thomas Henry Huxley

July 1895 – Mark Twain begins his around-the-world lecture tour. He went to north America and British Columbia, Canada from July–August 1895. Twain then went to Fiji, New Zealand (5 November–December 1895), Australia (17 December 1895–1 January 1896), Sri Lanka, India, Mauritius, and South Africa. Twain returns to England in July 1896

1 July 1895 – Eleanor and Edward Aveling start a holiday in Orpington in Kent

18 July 1895 – Henry Irving knighted at Windsor Castle

c. 21 July 1895 – Eleanor Marx learns that Frederick Lewis Demuth (1851−1929) is the son of Karl Marx

c. August 1895 – Samuel Butler in San Gottardo at Wassen, Hospenthal, Bellinzona in Switzerland

7–11 July 1896 – US Democratic National Convention of 1896, held at the Chicago Coliseum

9 July 1896 – William Jennings Bryan delivered his “Cross of Gold” speech at the US Democratic National Convention in Chicago

26 July–1 August 1896 – International Socialist Workers and Trade Union Congress, held in London, the 4th congress of the Second International

16 August 1896 – gold was discovered in the Klondike region of the Yukon in north-western Canada by local miners

August 1896–1899 – the Klondike Gold Rush, a migration of about 100,000 prospectors to the Klondike region of the Yukon in north-western Canada after gold was discovered there by local miners on 16 August 1896; when the news reached Seattle and San Francisco in 1897, there was a gold stampede from 1897–1898

29 August 1896 – Rudyard Kipling and his wife return to England from the US

September 1896 – Samuel Butler and Henry Festing Jones in Wassen and Basel

22 September 1896 – opening night of Henry Irving’s production of Cymbeline at the Lyceum theatre

1 October 1896 – Winston Churchill arrives in Bombay, India and travels with his regiment to Bangalore

3 November 1896 – United States presidential election of 1896; William McKinley (Republican candidate) defeated William Jennings Bryan (Democrat candidate)

19 December 1896 – opening night of Henry Irving’s Richard III at the Lyceum; Irving injuries himself after the play and Lyceum closes until 25 January 1897

1897
1897–1898 – Theodore Roosevelt is Assistant Secretary of the US Navy

January 1897 – foundation of Dawson City by Joseph Ladue; the town was the centre of the Klondike Gold Rush

February 1897 – Lenin sentenced to 3 years exile in eastern Siberia

February 1897–February 1900 – Lenin in Siberia

18 May 1897 – Oscar Wilde released from prison

26 May 1897 – publication of Bram Stoker’s Dracula

5 April–8 May 1897 – the Greco-Turkish War of 1897 (or the Thirty Days’ War), a war between Greece and the Ottoman Empire, caused by the status of the Ottoman province of Crete; there was a decisive Ottoman military victory